As an employer, I always do a quick web search for the candidate's name. It almost never produces anything that sways my hiring choice. But, in this case, if I saw the nonsense she posts on twitter, I definitely wouldn't hire her even if she's fantastic at her job. I, and I'm sure many others, try to construct a great team of people who are low ego, accept criticism, and won't create drama. This person, I'm pretty sure, would make a real mess of my team, and a quick web search in the future will tell all potential future employers that.
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
So Google used horizontal partitioning to split load across servers? Wow, that's rocket science. None of us in the database community have thought of doing this before.:-) But, if you want to find some news here, you can. One nice thing that Google did recently was to donate their horizontal partitioning code for Hibernate to the open source community. Hibernate Shards definitely needs a lot of work to get it to the point where it does a lot of stuff that people would want, but, hey, release early and often!
Here's the one-sided phone conversation, as heard from a neighbor of the support person at SourceLabs.
Hey, is Arnold around? This is Frank over at SourceLabs. Hey, Arnold. It's me again. How's it going tonight? Oh, really, it's 2:30am there? Wow. Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's raining here in Seattle, of course. Hey, listen, the reason I'm calling is because your shit, yeah, yeah, it's crashing again. Hey, don't blame me. Talk to your manager about it. Well, he's the one that bought this support. Listen, though... the stack trace pops up on my screen here and I'm supposed to give you a call. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's 24x7. You're somewhere in that 24 and somewhere in that 7, so here I am. Yeah, I don't enjoy this either. I know what you mean. Well, the stack trace looks like your Oracle database is hosed again. Yeah, tell me about it. Well, you're using the thin-client drivers. Looks like you can't get any JDBC connections. What a bitch. I know, sucks that your site is down. What a pisser. Well, most people monitor this kind of basic stuff on their own. Yeah. Uh huh. Well, maybe some log4j and Nagios would work. Or something. Yeah, really. It'd save the time it takes me to call you. Good thing you're only taking like 100 orders/minute at this time of day. Heh heh heh. Yeah, I had to wake my ass up early this morning, too. I'd almost rather be doing drywall at the new McDonald's. Yeah, ok, cool. Well, see if you can get your Oracle P.O.S. back up again. Definitely. Cool. Well, I'll probably talk to you soon. Bye!
The SEC has a law around what's called "Pattern Day Trading". In short, it requires that if an individual makes a certain number round trips in and out of stocks in a certain number of days (something like 5 roundtrips in 3 days, you can google for the law if you care), they're classified as a "Pattern Day Trader". In order to be allowed to continue pattern day trading, your account balance must be at least $25K. If not, you're barred from trading for a certain amount of time.
The idea behind this, of course, is that if someone has enough money in their account and they want to lose it trading, go for it. It's a classic "government protecting you from yourself" law.
As an engineer, I often have to give a presentation to middle and upper management to justify my existence at the company. (Thank you, Company, for accepting me. I love you, Company.) Often times, my manager wants to review my presentation before I give it, presumably to make sure I haven't littered it with pornography or disparaging remarks about his incompetence.
Having your manager review your presentation is bad.
Invariably, they will have recommendations to make. You could have spent your every waking moment working on this presentation, but that doesn't matter. They'll want to change a word here, make this boldface over here, change this color here, make this a line chart instead of a bar graph. They will want things changed. They'll want you to add tons of things which turn a simple presentation into something more like a narrative, a paper, or a book---something that someone could read without you even presenting it. Often, this has little actual affect on what's really being delivered by the presentation.
And, invariably, they'll want to review those changes again. And, of course, you see this coming, they'll want to change things again. Sometimes they'll even change things back to the way you originally had it. This process of change, review, change, review happens continuously up until the meeting is actually given.
What this has taught me is that it's best to hold your presentation materials until the day before the meeting, if possible, because it will dramatically reduce the amount of time allowed for the reviewer(s). Remember: The reviewer(s) are often people that have no real ability (or need) to contribute to the project that you're working on. These people exist solely to facilitate (i.e., add overhead). The less time you give them to review, the less time you'll be forced to make meaningless changes.
The most recent presentation I gave was reviewed by at least 50% of the group to whom I was presenting, including the two VPs (presumably the people who most needed to see the presentation). They all made recommendations. So, what's the point of me giving it exactly?
(Sigh.) I guess I'm feeling a bit demotivated today.
Check out the prospectus of any publically traded company. It's completely normal to list just about every possible thing that could happen to the company negatively which would affect shareholder value. Think of it as "cover your ass" material.
Seriously, read the prospectus of a company you know and understand very well, such as a traditional retailer like Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, or Barnes and Noble. They'll list things like potential litigation, seasonal variances, competitors, natural disasters, affect of the institution of internet taxation on their business, etc., etc.
So, this is SCO's way of trying to prevent a class action suit by shareholders in the event that they are sued by companies/persons in the Linux community.
E means they are deliquent in SEC filings; usually it's related to earnings (as it is in SCO's case). Other letters used commonly are Q (bankruptcy filings; bad) or Y (trading as depository receipts (ADRs); not bad, for example, ERICY).
A lot of other posters have already explained reasons why they are, so instead of rehashing their arguments, I'll just give some real-world examples with which I was involved.
My mother had two stores at one point, both of which used computerized point-of-sale systems. The system was DOS and worked pretty well. It did the reporting she needed, interfaced with mechanized cash drawers, a poll display, and a bar code scanner. Things worked pretty well, and it was even networked and had two machines. She was much happier than with the old system of a cash register with a lot of hand inventory keeping.
Then, the vendor decided to come out with a new Windows based system. She was very reluctant to change because the new system meant having to buy all new hardware and some new training for her and her employees as many of the screens had changed. But, she couldn't continue to get support for the old DOS based system because the vendor, understandably, wanted to only support their new Windows-based system.
So, the new system was installed. Aside from the enormous migration problems which aren't relevant here, she was really unhappy with it. Mice do NOT work well in a retail environment where they are used constantly and get gunk inside their roller balls and buttons. Employees tended to not learn shortcut keys because they seemed to perceive the mouse as easier to use, whereas in the old DOS system, they had no choice but to use keys. The keyboards were beasts and never seemed to die, but the mice did.
There were no new features that interested her at all; she forked out the $10K+ to upgrade because she had to. During the holiday season, the cashiers were slower with the new system than with the old one, in general, partly because they didn't use shortcut keys and partly because shortcut keys weren't always usable in all screens and situations.
Done properly, a GUI can be just as effective as a TUI, but all too many times, a lot of the GUIs I've seen for repetitive tasks (e.g., telemarketing data entry, POS, etc.) are horribly inaccessable. Since TUIs, at least to some degree, have to be accessable, they often work better.
What I find so interesting is that when an article comes up that has an "unacceptable" company (e.g., Microsoft) who patents something they consider ridiculous, we hear constant screams of outrage. We hear the patent office needs an overhaul.
Now, when someone in the "acceptable" camp such as Apple patents something like a user interface design, I see nothing. I read through all of the top moderated comments (there were 275 at the time I posted this) and there was almost zero questioning of this.
I've been reading Slashdot for a really long time, and it's been very interesting to watch the collective "morals and values" shift over time. It used to be that anything which wasn't truly Free was shunned by the collective. They were anti-business, anti-government involvement. Then Apple came along with its shiny colors and pretty user interface that ran UNIX. A huge amount of people in the collective dropped the Free banner and decided Apple was okay to use. It's as if they just changed their value system overnight when they saw OS X. (Now, I might as well say that this isn't sour grapes; I never carried the Free banner, I have a Powerbook, I have Linux servers, and I even (gasp) have a Windows machine. I'll also say that I thought the One Click patent was pretty silly and I think patenting a user interface like the iPod's is silly.)
I'm finding that I only read the comments now for laughs. I know precisely what they're all going to say before I even click through. I maybe read the comments on one out of every thirty articles. I used to admire some of the Slashdot collective for their insightful comments, but now a lot of what's marked as insightful is only marked so because it supports the current Slashdot collective thought.
I can't wait to see the next article where Microsoft or Amazon or some other "evil corporation" patents a UI or business process concept. We'll hear the outrage and 0x0d0a and I will probably just shake our heads.
All of this time, I thought google was actually doing something interesting. It turns out, these guys aren't really doing anything at all! I took a tour the other day and here's what things really look like behind the scenes.
They have 2 front end web servers running Apache on some eMachines they got at Best Buy. They have a backend MySQL server running on a really big eMachine (2 GHz, if I recall correctly). The backend MySQL machine has two IDE hard drives, but they are like 200 GB each. They're hooked up via a 256K frac T1, but I hear they are behind on the monthly payments.
Each time you hit google's page and do a search, it issues an SQL query like this:
SELECT * FROM the_web WHERE text REGEXP [what you entered]
They just moved out of one of the guy's apartments into some small rented office space in a shady part of town outside of Mountain View, CA. Mark my words, these google guys will be out of business in like two months.
I'm going on tours of Yahoo and Amazon in the next couple of weeks. I'll get to the bottom of this internet hype, don't you worry.
Note that the market as a whole is down today, as well. I don't think that Redhat's release of these copyrights has much to do with this very short term decline at all. I doubt that eCos was ever much of a revenue stream for them at all.
It's not as if Redhat is somehow being forced legally to assign copyrights to some major portion of what generates profitability for them. eCos doesn't fit with what Redhat's business model is about any more, so they're giving it away.
I was always stuck using floppies. We all know the reliability of floppies sucks. It's even worse after being the bottom of a bookbag with a calculus book that weighs 12 pounds sitting on top of it for a day.
Also, back in my day (and I only finished my undergrad degree in 1998), most people didn't have fast network connections in their residence yet, so I would download large files to my shell account at school and head over with a stack of floppies to copy the files, then head back home and hope that the stars were aligned properly and the wacky SCSI floppy drive on the DEC workstation at school and my cheap junk $10 floppy drive in my Linux machine would jive.
I recently saw a 256 MB Lexan USB 2.0 keychain drive for about $50 locally on sale. If you would've told me ten years ago something like that would be available at your local warehouse club, I would've laughed at you and said "no way!"
"Your as stupid as they they come." Two problems with that sentence, jackass. That should be "you're" (a contraction for "you are"), not your. Also, you said "they they".
When it comes to a mouse, I want something that I can get attached to and keep for a very long time. Unfortunately, mouse manufacturers are a lot like cordless phone manufacturers: models are constantly discontinued and new ones come out. I have two Logitech TrackMan Marble FX trackballs, one at home and one at work, that I love.
Unfortunately, Logitech stopped making them a while ago and, while they do have trackballs still, I don't like any of them as much as my current one. I'd be afraid that one day my rechargable battery would stop holding a good charge and, due to engineering idiocy on the part of the manufacturer, they would not allow you to replace the battery (in the hopes of getting you to buy another one).
A lot of products use non-replacable rechargable batteries. If this mouse uses them, I'd probably not buy one. Of course, since I can't read the article, I don't know if the article even addresses this point. If Logitech does allow replacement, then good for them (and us!).
A few of my co-workers are getting these machines, but I would prefer to stick with Linux, partly because I don't want to learn the quirks of yet another operating system.
But another big part is (*gasp*)... freedom. I don't get the source to everything in OS X. I can't easily modify anything, recompile, and reap the benefits of my change. I'm not a free software bigot that feels free software is the best thing in every situation (I do, after all, work on proprietary software every day).
Plus, what do I use each day? fvwm. xterm. Emacs. Mozilla. gcc. Perl. Ruby. That's really it. OS X really doesn't give me anything over what I currently use, the hardware is closed, the OS is closed, and it's expensive.
I also don't care about pretty. Come look at my desktop if you don't believe me. My Emacs doesn't even have scrollbars or the cute little toolbar. I got rid of that stuff ages ago in the name of screen real estate.
OS X doesn't make sense for me, but I can understand why it makes sense for others since it probably runs the apps they want to run.
But for me, I'll stick with Linux. But when they bring that little fishtank screen saver up on their OS X machine, I'll agree that it looks pretty damn sweet!
He says rules are designed to reflect home use -- while addressing piracy fears that prevent Hollywood from releasing more high-quality content.
High quality content... Not a whole lot of that seems to come out of Hollywood any more. Depending on how you interpret that quote, it could mean that Hollywood has generated all kinds of great, high quality stuff, but they just aren't releasing it because they're afraid of piracy. If that's true, then why generate the content in the first place?:-)
I picked up a 2200dse (duplexing, USB/parallel but no network) for just over $700. It has built-in PostScript which makes setup under UNIX-like OSes easy and eliminates the need for ghostscript which I've used over the last eight years. HP had a deal where you buy an additional toner cartridge at the same time and get 16 MB of RAM free. I sprang for it. I also picked up a 610n JetDirect 10/100 card off of eBay reasonably cheap. It's quite nice to have it on my network at home with minimal setup hassles.
Great quality printing at a not-too-unreasonable price. My previous printer (HP LJ 4L, which I paid $700 for back in, oh, late 1993/early 1994) ran without a single problem around 15K-20K sheets---hopefully this will last as long or longer.
Yes, that's a bit of a convoluted command line, but it does the job. I'm sure there's a better way of doing it, but the above has worked for me for quite a while. All you'd have to do is download it to your iPod.
Also, a lot of radio stations and programs have pre-determined times when they cut to commercials. If you're adventurous, you could have those automatically cut out. I've looked into doing it, but never got around to it.
Sorry, I don't mean to be mean or anything, but you are the exact reason why this approach should not be taken for the mass market.
You're not being mean, you're agreeing with me. I fully understand that I don't use my computer in a typical way, I even said that in my original post in my first sentence:...because the way I use my computer is so vastly different from others... The reason I bothered to post (I don't do it often) was because I think my view probably reflects that of a lot of others that would read something like Slashdot.
But until that time, whatever appeals to the unwashed masses will rule the desktop.
Yep, I agree. But one of the things which I've grown to really like about UNIX over time is that it stays the same. Tools I used eight years ago are still available, if I want to use them. Papers I wrote early in college can still be compiled with LaTeX and presented exactly as they were then. I adjust everything exactly like I want it, and when I sit down, it's perfect. It's like a comfy chair.
In that same time, we've gone from Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. On the Mac side, we've moved to OS X. There are differences between each of these, but amongst all of that change, I've continued (primarily) to use what I've always used. Sure, I've tried KDE, Gnome, and I use Windows for games, but I always go back to what's comfortable.
In short, we agree. I'm not the user most software vendors care about. But that's okay, it doesn't bother me.:-)
I don't put a lot of stock into articles like these because the way I use my computer is so vastly different from others that most people couldn't even sit down and use my computer if they wanted to.
No, that's not "bragging" or me feeling "31337". It's just a fact that over the period of eight years of using UNIX, I've gotten things reduced to the minimum amount of stuff I need with the exact customizations I want.
My desktop has nothing but an xclock (yes, the real xclock in digital mode). My Emacs has no toolbars or scrollbars. All fvwm does for me is decorate my windows and give me a root menu. zsh is finely tuned for my daily tasks with all kinds of aliases.
And that's the thing... UNIX has always given me the capabilities to make my user interface work exactly like I want. This is something most other OSes just haven't given me. If you use Windows, you get a one-size-fits-all interface that assumes you do a particular set of common tasks. For many people, that's exactly what they want, because they do very similar tasks. But for me, I spend my days using a large number of xterms, Emacs, and Mozilla. I need nothing else, I want nothing else. Just give me screen real estate, UNIX, and I'll customize it to my precise needs.
I'd be great if Windows would give you those kinds of capabilities. I find myself frustrated every time I use it. Mostly because it's not what I'm used to, but partially because I can't change the way it works when I disagree with what the human-computer interaction, GUI-gurus have dictated everyone needs.
The PostgreSQL team themselves have excellent docs available in a variety of online and printable formats.
Dead tree stuff, Addison-Wesley publishes a great book, O'Reilly has a decent book, and Sam's has one that I haven't read yet.
With the Addison-Wesley book (by Bruce Momjian, a regular on the PostgreSQL mailing lists) and the PostgreSQL team's docs, I went from little SQL and PostgreSQL knowledge, to being somewhat proficient in a few months.
Allows you to write, rewrite and backup data on CD as quickly and easily as you would on a floppy disk.
Yea! Yippee! Those floppies sure are quick! And with the amount of data loss I've seen, those floppies are easy, too! Someone should sit down with their marketing people and show them that most of us probably wouldn't interpret that sentence as a compliment to their product.
We found a code gen bug in gcc a long time ago on Sparc. We fixed it and submitted a patch. We could have, perhaps, worked around it, but we didn't need to since we had the gcc source.
Incidently, the gcc source is surprisingly easy to read. I've referred to it numerous times to see why something does what it does, what different command line options do, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
As an employer, I always do a quick web search for the candidate's name. It almost never produces anything that sways my hiring choice. But, in this case, if I saw the nonsense she posts on twitter, I definitely wouldn't hire her even if she's fantastic at her job. I, and I'm sure many others, try to construct a great team of people who are low ego, accept criticism, and won't create drama. This person, I'm pretty sure, would make a real mess of my team, and a quick web search in the future will tell all potential future employers that.
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
So Google used horizontal partitioning to split load across servers? Wow, that's rocket science. None of us in the database community have thought of doing this before. :-) But, if you want to find some news here, you can. One nice thing that Google did recently was to donate their horizontal partitioning code for Hibernate to the open source community. Hibernate Shards definitely needs a lot of work to get it to the point where it does a lot of stuff that people would want, but, hey, release early and often!
Here's the one-sided phone conversation, as heard from a neighbor of the support person at SourceLabs.
Hey, is Arnold around? This is Frank over at SourceLabs.
Hey, Arnold. It's me again. How's it going tonight?
Oh, really, it's 2:30am there? Wow.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's raining here in Seattle, of course.
Hey, listen, the reason I'm calling is because your shit, yeah, yeah, it's crashing again.
Hey, don't blame me. Talk to your manager about it.
Well, he's the one that bought this support.
Listen, though... the stack trace pops up on my screen here and I'm supposed to give you a call.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's 24x7. You're somewhere in that 24 and somewhere in that 7, so here I am.
Yeah, I don't enjoy this either.
I know what you mean.
Well, the stack trace looks like your Oracle database is hosed again.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Well, you're using the thin-client drivers.
Looks like you can't get any JDBC connections. What a bitch.
I know, sucks that your site is down. What a pisser.
Well, most people monitor this kind of basic stuff on their own.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
Well, maybe some log4j and Nagios would work. Or something.
Yeah, really. It'd save the time it takes me to call you. Good thing you're only taking like 100 orders/minute at this time of day. Heh heh heh.
Yeah, I had to wake my ass up early this morning, too. I'd almost rather be doing drywall at the new McDonald's.
Yeah, ok, cool. Well, see if you can get your Oracle P.O.S. back up again.
Definitely.
Cool.
Well, I'll probably talk to you soon. Bye!
The SEC has a law around what's called "Pattern Day Trading". In short, it requires that if an individual makes a certain number round trips in and out of stocks in a certain number of days (something like 5 roundtrips in 3 days, you can google for the law if you care), they're classified as a "Pattern Day Trader". In order to be allowed to continue pattern day trading, your account balance must be at least $25K. If not, you're barred from trading for a certain amount of time.
The idea behind this, of course, is that if someone has enough money in their account and they want to lose it trading, go for it. It's a classic "government protecting you from yourself" law.
Having your manager review your presentation is bad.
Invariably, they will have recommendations to make. You could have spent your every waking moment working on this presentation, but that doesn't matter. They'll want to change a word here, make this boldface over here, change this color here, make this a line chart instead of a bar graph. They will want things changed. They'll want you to add tons of things which turn a simple presentation into something more like a narrative, a paper, or a book---something that someone could read without you even presenting it. Often, this has little actual affect on what's really being delivered by the presentation.
And, invariably, they'll want to review those changes again. And, of course, you see this coming, they'll want to change things again. Sometimes they'll even change things back to the way you originally had it. This process of change, review, change, review happens continuously up until the meeting is actually given.
What this has taught me is that it's best to hold your presentation materials until the day before the meeting, if possible, because it will dramatically reduce the amount of time allowed for the reviewer(s). Remember: The reviewer(s) are often people that have no real ability (or need) to contribute to the project that you're working on. These people exist solely to facilitate (i.e., add overhead). The less time you give them to review, the less time you'll be forced to make meaningless changes.
The most recent presentation I gave was reviewed by at least 50% of the group to whom I was presenting, including the two VPs (presumably the people who most needed to see the presentation). They all made recommendations. So, what's the point of me giving it exactly?
(Sigh.) I guess I'm feeling a bit demotivated today.
Check out the prospectus of any publically traded company. It's completely normal to list just about every possible thing that could happen to the company negatively which would affect shareholder value. Think of it as "cover your ass" material.
Seriously, read the prospectus of a company you know and understand very well, such as a traditional retailer like Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, or Barnes and Noble. They'll list things like potential litigation, seasonal variances, competitors, natural disasters, affect of the institution of internet taxation on their business, etc., etc.
So, this is SCO's way of trying to prevent a class action suit by shareholders in the event that they are sued by companies/persons in the Linux community.
E means they are deliquent in SEC filings; usually it's related to earnings (as it is in SCO's case). Other letters used commonly are Q (bankruptcy filings; bad) or Y (trading as depository receipts (ADRs); not bad, for example, ERICY).
A lot of other posters have already explained reasons why they are, so instead of rehashing their arguments, I'll just give some real-world examples with which I was involved.
My mother had two stores at one point, both of which used computerized point-of-sale systems. The system was DOS and worked pretty well. It did the reporting she needed, interfaced with mechanized cash drawers, a poll display, and a bar code scanner. Things worked pretty well, and it was even networked and had two machines. She was much happier than with the old system of a cash register with a lot of hand inventory keeping.
Then, the vendor decided to come out with a new Windows based system. She was very reluctant to change because the new system meant having to buy all new hardware and some new training for her and her employees as many of the screens had changed. But, she couldn't continue to get support for the old DOS based system because the vendor, understandably, wanted to only support their new Windows-based system.
So, the new system was installed. Aside from the enormous migration problems which aren't relevant here, she was really unhappy with it. Mice do NOT work well in a retail environment where they are used constantly and get gunk inside their roller balls and buttons. Employees tended to not learn shortcut keys because they seemed to perceive the mouse as easier to use, whereas in the old DOS system, they had no choice but to use keys. The keyboards were beasts and never seemed to die, but the mice did.
There were no new features that interested her at all; she forked out the $10K+ to upgrade because she had to. During the holiday season, the cashiers were slower with the new system than with the old one, in general, partly because they didn't use shortcut keys and partly because shortcut keys weren't always usable in all screens and situations.
Done properly, a GUI can be just as effective as a TUI, but all too many times, a lot of the GUIs I've seen for repetitive tasks (e.g., telemarketing data entry, POS, etc.) are horribly inaccessable. Since TUIs, at least to some degree, have to be accessable, they often work better.
What I find so interesting is that when an article comes up that has an "unacceptable" company (e.g., Microsoft) who patents something they consider ridiculous, we hear constant screams of outrage. We hear the patent office needs an overhaul.
Now, when someone in the "acceptable" camp such as Apple patents something like a user interface design, I see nothing. I read through all of the top moderated comments (there were 275 at the time I posted this) and there was almost zero questioning of this.
I've been reading Slashdot for a really long time, and it's been very interesting to watch the collective "morals and values" shift over time. It used to be that anything which wasn't truly Free was shunned by the collective. They were anti-business, anti-government involvement. Then Apple came along with its shiny colors and pretty user interface that ran UNIX. A huge amount of people in the collective dropped the Free banner and decided Apple was okay to use. It's as if they just changed their value system overnight when they saw OS X. (Now, I might as well say that this isn't sour grapes; I never carried the Free banner, I have a Powerbook, I have Linux servers, and I even (gasp) have a Windows machine. I'll also say that I thought the One Click patent was pretty silly and I think patenting a user interface like the iPod's is silly.)
I'm finding that I only read the comments now for laughs. I know precisely what they're all going to say before I even click through. I maybe read the comments on one out of every thirty articles. I used to admire some of the Slashdot collective for their insightful comments, but now a lot of what's marked as insightful is only marked so because it supports the current Slashdot collective thought.
I can't wait to see the next article where Microsoft or Amazon or some other "evil corporation" patents a UI or business process concept. We'll hear the outrage and 0x0d0a and I will probably just shake our heads.
All of this time, I thought google was actually doing something interesting. It turns out, these guys aren't really doing anything at all! I took a tour the other day and here's what things really look like behind the scenes.
They have 2 front end web servers running Apache on some eMachines they got at Best Buy. They have a backend MySQL server running on a really big eMachine (2 GHz, if I recall correctly). The backend MySQL machine has two IDE hard drives, but they are like 200 GB each. They're hooked up via a 256K frac T1, but I hear they are behind on the monthly payments.
Each time you hit google's page and do a search, it issues an SQL query like this:
SELECT * FROM the_web
WHERE text REGEXP [what you entered]
They just moved out of one of the guy's apartments into some small rented office space in a shady part of town outside of Mountain View, CA. Mark my words, these google guys will be out of business in like two months.
I'm going on tours of Yahoo and Amazon in the next couple of weeks. I'll get to the bottom of this internet hype, don't you worry.
Note that the market as a whole is down today, as well. I don't think that Redhat's release of these copyrights has much to do with this very short term decline at all. I doubt that eCos was ever much of a revenue stream for them at all.
It's not as if Redhat is somehow being forced legally to assign copyrights to some major portion of what generates profitability for them. eCos doesn't fit with what Redhat's business model is about any more, so they're giving it away.
I say, "Good for them!"
I was always stuck using floppies. We all know the reliability of floppies sucks. It's even worse after being the bottom of a bookbag with a calculus book that weighs 12 pounds sitting on top of it for a day.
Also, back in my day (and I only finished my undergrad degree in 1998), most people didn't have fast network connections in their residence yet, so I would download large files to my shell account at school and head over with a stack of floppies to copy the files, then head back home and hope that the stars were aligned properly and the wacky SCSI floppy drive on the DEC workstation at school and my cheap junk $10 floppy drive in my Linux machine would jive.
I recently saw a 256 MB Lexan USB 2.0 keychain drive for about $50 locally on sale. If you would've told me ten years ago something like that would be available at your local warehouse club, I would've laughed at you and said "no way!"
"Your as stupid as they they come." Two problems with that sentence, jackass. That should be "you're" (a contraction for "you are"), not your. Also, you said "they they".
When it comes to a mouse, I want something that I can get attached to and keep for a very long time. Unfortunately, mouse manufacturers are a lot like cordless phone manufacturers: models are constantly discontinued and new ones come out. I have two Logitech TrackMan Marble FX trackballs, one at home and one at work, that I love.
Unfortunately, Logitech stopped making them a while ago and, while they do have trackballs still, I don't like any of them as much as my current one. I'd be afraid that one day my rechargable battery would stop holding a good charge and, due to engineering idiocy on the part of the manufacturer, they would not allow you to replace the battery (in the hopes of getting you to buy another one).
A lot of products use non-replacable rechargable batteries. If this mouse uses them, I'd probably not buy one. Of course, since I can't read the article, I don't know if the article even addresses this point. If Logitech does allow replacement, then good for them (and us!).
A few of my co-workers are getting these machines, but I would prefer to stick with Linux, partly because I don't want to learn the quirks of yet another operating system.
But another big part is (*gasp*)... freedom. I don't get the source to everything in OS X. I can't easily modify anything, recompile, and reap the benefits of my change. I'm not a free software bigot that feels free software is the best thing in every situation (I do, after all, work on proprietary software every day).
Plus, what do I use each day? fvwm. xterm. Emacs. Mozilla. gcc. Perl. Ruby. That's really it. OS X really doesn't give me anything over what I currently use, the hardware is closed, the OS is closed, and it's expensive.
I also don't care about pretty. Come look at my desktop if you don't believe me. My Emacs doesn't even have scrollbars or the cute little toolbar. I got rid of that stuff ages ago in the name of screen real estate.
OS X doesn't make sense for me, but I can understand why it makes sense for others since it probably runs the apps they want to run.
But for me, I'll stick with Linux. But when they bring that little fishtank screen saver up on their OS X machine, I'll agree that it looks pretty damn sweet!
High quality content... Not a whole lot of that seems to come out of Hollywood any more. Depending on how you interpret that quote, it could mean that Hollywood has generated all kinds of great, high quality stuff, but they just aren't releasing it because they're afraid of piracy. If that's true, then why generate the content in the first place? :-)
I picked up a 2200dse (duplexing, USB/parallel but no network) for just over $700. It has built-in PostScript which makes setup under UNIX-like OSes easy and eliminates the need for ghostscript which I've used over the last eight years. HP had a deal where you buy an additional toner cartridge at the same time and get 16 MB of RAM free. I sprang for it. I also picked up a 610n JetDirect 10/100 card off of eBay reasonably cheap. It's quite nice to have it on my network at home with minimal setup hassles.
Great quality printing at a not-too-unreasonable price. My previous printer (HP LJ 4L, which I paid $700 for back in, oh, late 1993/early 1994) ran without a single problem around 15K-20K sheets---hopefully this will last as long or longer.
I have a crontab entry which just records what I want to hear each day. It uses rawrec, sox, and bladeenc to do the job.
/archive/radio && /usr/local/bin/rawrec -c 1 -s 32000 -f u8 -t 3600 | sox -b -r 32000 -u -t raw -c 1 - -t wav - 2>/dev/null | /usr/local/bin/bladeenc -128 -quiet STDIN $FILENAME.mp3
Here is an example crontab entry:
0 18 * * 1-5 FILENAME=foo-`date +\%Y\%m\%d`_1 ; cd
Yes, that's a bit of a convoluted command line, but it does the job. I'm sure there's a better way of doing it, but the above has worked for me for quite a while. All you'd have to do is download it to your iPod.
Also, a lot of radio stations and programs have pre-determined times when they cut to commercials. If you're adventurous, you could have those automatically cut out. I've looked into doing it, but never got around to it.
You're not being mean, you're agreeing with me. I fully understand that I don't use my computer in a typical way, I even said that in my original post in my first sentence: ...because the way I use my computer is so vastly different from others... The reason I bothered to post (I don't do it often) was because I think my view probably reflects that of a lot of others that would read something like Slashdot.
Yep, I agree. But one of the things which I've grown to really like about UNIX over time is that it stays the same. Tools I used eight years ago are still available, if I want to use them. Papers I wrote early in college can still be compiled with LaTeX and presented exactly as they were then. I adjust everything exactly like I want it, and when I sit down, it's perfect. It's like a comfy chair.
In that same time, we've gone from Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. On the Mac side, we've moved to OS X. There are differences between each of these, but amongst all of that change, I've continued (primarily) to use what I've always used. Sure, I've tried KDE, Gnome, and I use Windows for games, but I always go back to what's comfortable.
In short, we agree. I'm not the user most software vendors care about. But that's okay, it doesn't bother me. :-)
I don't put a lot of stock into articles like these because the way I use my computer is so vastly different from others that most people couldn't even sit down and use my computer if they wanted to.
No, that's not "bragging" or me feeling "31337". It's just a fact that over the period of eight years of using UNIX, I've gotten things reduced to the minimum amount of stuff I need with the exact customizations I want.
My desktop has nothing but an xclock (yes, the real xclock in digital mode). My Emacs has no toolbars or scrollbars. All fvwm does for me is decorate my windows and give me a root menu. zsh is finely tuned for my daily tasks with all kinds of aliases.
And that's the thing... UNIX has always given me the capabilities to make my user interface work exactly like I want. This is something most other OSes just haven't given me. If you use Windows, you get a one-size-fits-all interface that assumes you do a particular set of common tasks. For many people, that's exactly what they want, because they do very similar tasks. But for me, I spend my days using a large number of xterms, Emacs, and Mozilla. I need nothing else, I want nothing else. Just give me screen real estate, UNIX, and I'll customize it to my precise needs.
I'd be great if Windows would give you those kinds of capabilities. I find myself frustrated every time I use it. Mostly because it's not what I'm used to, but partially because I can't change the way it works when I disagree with what the human-computer interaction, GUI-gurus have dictated everyone needs.
The PostgreSQL team themselves have excellent docs available in a variety of online and printable formats.
Dead tree stuff, Addison-Wesley publishes a great book, O'Reilly has a decent book, and Sam's has one that I haven't read yet.
With the Addison-Wesley book (by Bruce Momjian, a regular on the PostgreSQL mailing lists) and the PostgreSQL team's docs, I went from little SQL and PostgreSQL knowledge, to being somewhat proficient in a few months.
I like this text from the product info page:
Yea! Yippee! Those floppies sure are quick! And with the amount of data loss I've seen, those floppies are easy, too! Someone should sit down with their marketing people and show them that most of us probably wouldn't interpret that sentence as a compliment to their product.
We found a code gen bug in gcc a long time ago on Sparc. We fixed it and submitted a patch. We could have, perhaps, worked around it, but we didn't need to since we had the gcc source.
Incidently, the gcc source is surprisingly easy to read. I've referred to it numerous times to see why something does what it does, what different command line options do, etc.